Saturday, January 31, 2015

Wondering how often have we gone out and come home feeling unsatisfied with the food outside? Pretty often it seems, and with the price of eating out escalating these days, it might be a better option to dine in.

With that in mind, a couple of us from the sg food community have banded together to start the #creativesghomecooks initiative.

#creativesghomecooks is a monthly cooking challenge meant for everyone in Singapore, and the purpose of this challenge is to encourage Singaporeans to cook more at home.

We will have a new challenge every month and there will be a specific theme for every challenge. For the month of February, seeing that it is both Lunar New Year and the month for Valentine's Day, the theme will be red.

Here are some simple guidelines for the challenge :

1. If you decide to take up the challenge, all you will have to do is to come up with a home cooked dish that adheres to the theme. For example, in the red challenge your dish will need to feature the colour red. Mind you, it does not have to be entirely red, just some components will do.

2. It can be a savoury or sweet dish, and it does not have to be complex or overly creative. As long as it is a homemade dish, simple or otherwise, it is good enough.

3. Take a photo of the completed dish and post it on social media, either on your own blog if you have one or preferably, on Instagram and add the hashtag #creativesghomecooks.

4. Nominate at least one other person to take up the challenge, preferably via Instagram using the @ user tag. You can nominate as many as you like. If you have a blog, you can also nominate or tag the person there.

5. If you have been tagged, there is no penalty or forfeit for not taking up the challenge as this is meant to be a fun challenge, but we do highly encourage you to at least try.

6. Each challenge will last for a month but if you do miss the dateline, you are still free to post the previous month's food photo. Just remember to use the hashtag.

7. You can do more than one dish per challenge.

8. Do not use outside food, as we encourage participants to cook everything from home.

As mentioned, this is not restricted to bloggers as we want to have as many folks from the social food community of Singapore to participate as possible. Even if you are a noob in the kitchen, this is possibly the best time to start learning your way around the kitchen. No time like the present to start cooking.

Cooking is meant to be fun and as such, do not feel pressured to come up with professional looking food. As long as it is a home cooked dish, this is more than sufficient to meet the aims of this challenge.

Outside of this challenge, the #creativesghomecooks hashtag can also be used for any of your own homemade dishes so do not restrict it just for this. It is meant for Singaporean home cooked food!

For the red challenge, I am nominating PinkyPiggu, Lirongs, The Food Chapter and Hannah Chiah of Too Blessed To Be Stressed. Hope you guys will join in the fun!

With that, let's kick off #creativesghomecooks and here's hoping we have more home cooking in 2015!